[News] MonoDevelop 1.0 Reaches Beta - Linux

This is a discussion on [News] MonoDevelop 1.0 Reaches Beta - Linux ; The Mono Project: You Might Expect the Unexpected
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| For those readers who have a bias toward Mono, I understand. I mean, I feel
| your pain. In the mean time, it might help to get off ...

[News] MonoDevelop 1.0 Reaches Beta

The Mono Project: You Might Expect the Unexpected

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| For those readers who have a bias toward Mono, I understand. I mean, I feel
| your pain. In the mean time, it might help to get off it and take a real look
| at what Miguel and his development team have accomplish.
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| Some people say the drawback to Mono is the saber rattling from Microsoft
| about patent, and that it doesn't support the latest versions of .NET. What
| is your relationship like with Microsoft these days? Â*
|
| [Miguel:] So, I have two positions, and one is speaking as the person
| managing the Mono team, and then there is another answer speaking as a Novell
| vice president. So from the position of the open source community -- a
| position not attached to Novell -- we as any other software project are aware
| that software patents are a problem. We don't like them. We think they're bad
| for the industry, but we know that we need to abide by that system. So we
| have a very strict policy, that we'll not knowingly introduce patented code
| into the Mono code base. If somebody raises an issue with us about a patent,
| or that we're infringing on their code base, we'll be more than happy to
| either do an investigation to see if there's prior art that will invalidate a
| patent claim, or basically re-implement the same functionality using a
| different approach. Or, if worse comes to worse, removing the code from Mono.
| And I think that's pretty much the same rule that every open source project
| has to use. Â* Â* Â* Â* Â* Â*
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| I read the agreement between Xandros and Microsoft, and one of the excluded
| products was Mono, so Microsoft promises to not sue Xandros over their
| distribution but excluding Mono and a few other products, i.e. they reserve
| the right to sue over Mono. I wonder if this is an interesting preview of on
| what basis they want to fight the free world. Â* Â*
|
| Interestingly, the Novell deal seems to be different, Mono is not excluded
| from the Novell deal. So Microsoft seems to be promising not to sue Novell
| over Mono, but keeps the option open for Xandros. Weird but true. Â*
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| is Mono's role in the deal that of a hook to make customers write
| .NET applications because they can be run on Linux - only to find
| later on that they are armless or legless because of a change in
| the .NETspecifications, a change which Microsoft decides not to
| make public?
|
| [...]
|
| And here we have an individual who decides to replicate one of
| the proprietary company's development environments - for reasons
| best known to him alone - and keeps telling people that the reason
| he's doing it is so that he can pull people over from the
| proprietary company's side to his side!!!
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Re: [News] MonoDevelop 1.0 Reaches Beta

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| Look at the wishlist which de Icaza mentioned in the interview - he
| wants a technical deal between Mono and .NET and wants Microsoft to
| recommend Mono to developers looking at migration. Sure. A company
| which is trying to push its own operating systems into every
| possible nook and corner, and facing some resistance from Linux, is
| definitely going to be inclined to recommend something that will
| take people away from its own O-S and help them move to one with
| which it is doing battle. Excellent logic there, Miguel!
|
| These crackpot arguments are exactly why I think there is something
| much more sinister in the Novell-Microsoft deal, something that is
| intimately connected with Mono. It is high time that the whole
| story was told.
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I don't know much about de Icaza's plans for world domination, but I do
question the prudence of mimicking anything that Microsoft does, given
their rather dubious technical accomplishments over the years, and their
reputation for shafting "partners".

Mono is undoubtedly a potential patent threat (the operative word being
"threat", since I doubt that Microsoft will ever do more than rattle
sabres as a coercive measure - their speciality), but moreover Mono is
a viral plague in the Linux ecosystem, introducing wholly unnecessary
Microsoft germs that will attack the very DNA of Linux, at the source.
The curse of proprietary drivers already threatens to turn Linux into
"just another Windows"; God only knows what kind of spaghetti-hoops Mono
will make of it. No thanks.